Thursday, March 7, 2013

Like Playing The Lottery

I mentioned a few days ago that I knew it was time to stop writing for awhile when I was peering over my computer screen to watch an episode of Drop Dead Diva, and how that was my cue to do something more productive than watch Drop Dead Diva, like surf the internet for online auctions. Although I’ve already featured the second thing I found that evening, the Conklin with the unusual side clip, I forgot to circle back around and show you the first thing I found:

Here’s another example of the Gordon, and this one is a ferocious little pipsqueak with a telephone dialer and the usual Gordon "fanged" clip, designed to sink its teeth into your shirt pocket and not to release its grip until the bail at the top is pressed downwards:

William Gordon, of Union, New Jersey, filed a patent application for the clip on April 3, 1930, and it was granted as patent number 1,834,151 on December 1, 1931:

Gordon later applied for an improved version of the clip on January 16, 1940. There’s a picture of one on page 83 of The Catalogue:

Patent number 2,268,116 was issued for this clip on December 30, 1940:

However, I still haven’t been able to find an example of Gordon’s first version of the clip, for which he applied for a patent on February 7, 1929 and received patent number 1,813,396 on July 7, 1931:

I guess I’ll have to save that one for the next time I’m watching Drop Dead Diva. Getting back to today’s example, the color mismatch between the pencil and the cap suggest that this may be a mismatch, but I don’t think so– at least the part is correct, even if the color isn’t. Here’s the other example of a telephone dialer Gordon that I’ve had for a few years now:

And both the red veined cream colored plastic and the bronze and cream color are typical colors for a Gordon:

It’s possible that Gordon decided to jazz things up a bit by making two-color pencils out of parts from each:

But if anyone’s got a red veined example with a bronze and cream cap and wants to swap parts, I’m all ears!